Asus has toughened the competition in the mobile market by launching its

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London, June 11 : Social networking sites have sounded the death knell for traditional instant messengers like Yahoo, MSN and Windows Live Messenger, with the latter’s use falling by 25 per cent in

London, June 11 : Japanese researchers have unveiled a humanoid robot that can understand three humans shouting at once.

Hiroshi Okuno at Kyoto University, and Kazuhiro Nakadai at the Honda Research Institute in Saitama call their robot Asimo.

The researchers attribute Asimo’s mind-blowing ability to the new software they have designed, called HARK.

They have revealed that the software involves eight microphones to work out where each voice is coming from and isolate it from other sound sources.

It later works out how reliably it has extracted an individual voice, and then passes it onto speech-recognition software to decode, say the researchers.

Okuno insists that the HARK-based robot can go beyond normal human listening capabilities.

In an effort to take advantage of the potential in rural telecom markets,